They could have been so happy together. The beautiful and mondaine courtesan Violetta Valéry meets the rich young Alfredo Germont, who wins her heart and longs to save her from the vicious circle of a “kept woman” and to live privately and placidly with her. But disaster strikes them in the person of Alfredo’s father, Giorgio Germont. He appeals to Violetta’s conscience not to besmirch the standing of a well-situated family, and makes her relinquish her relationship with his son, because otherwise his daughter, Alfredo’s sister, will not be able to marry well. Father Germont represents a society which does not approve of rapprochements between decent citizens and those who have “gone off the track” (such is the meaning of the word “traviata”). Violetta should have known all along that it could not end well, but hope ends only with death.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) in his “La traviata”, first performed in 1853, was concerned not for the first time with the rôle of the underdog. The opera based on the popular novel “La Dame aux Camélias” by Alexandre Dumas the Younger comprises, even more than “Rigoletto” and “Il trovatore”, a relentless exposure of the failings of society. Concerned only with money and trade, nobody cares for the feelings and the longings of individual people. The result is loneliness and friendlessness.

With the staging they first brought out in 1997 at the Leipzig opera, the renowned opera stage-director and theatrical manager Andreas Homokl and his designer Frank Philipp Schlößmann drew attention to the slippery nature of the social floor trodden by the title-heroine with her moments of happiness and her final doom.